Open source software technology in advancement of geomatics education

Geomatics is a relatively new discipline, which is associated with the spatial referenced and heterogeneous geographic information. The rapid growth in the popularity of geomatics is due to advancement in the field of computing techniques, hardware and software, as well as space based and airborne remote sensing technologies. The remote sensing platform has been providing vast amount of geographical information at various levels of temporal, spatial, spectral, radiometric resolution. On the other hand, the development in software technology gives the better solutions at very low budget. Meanwhile the efforts have been made for developing a common platform to disseminate the spatial information among various stakeholders of scientific and educational community. These efforts include providing free software's as well as remote sensing data at absolutely free of cost. A new open source sharing platform has emerged from the joint initiatives of the educationist, researchers and software developers. Present paper throws light on the contemporary development of this open source technology in field of geomatics. An effort has been made to review the main components of open source technology at desktop and web based platforms, while the significance of open source technologies has been also discussed.